Falling for the Falls
We just got back from the Iguazu Falls, and there isn’t all that much to say about them other than, well, wow. Nevertheless, we’ll try to elaborate.
Last Thursday we flew to Foz do Iguacu through Gol, Brazil’s premier budget airline. As far as we can tell, their service is efficient and their landings are berserk: according to my sister’s boyfriend, they use a cheaper variety of brakes that cool off faster than hydraulic ones, allowing their aircrafts to land, drop people off, and take off within 20 minutes or so. The flipside is that the planes hit the ground incredibly hard and only slow down because the turbines/engines are reversed, which leads me to believe that an emergency landing in case of an engine issue would be all but a lost cause.
On Friday we arranged to have a guide, Heberth, help us tour the Argentina side of the falls. While we’d like to avoid guided tours as much as possible during this trip, we were convinced it would be much faster and easier to go through border/customs procedures and navigate the huge national park if we had someone experienced around (we were right); we also avoided the hassle of multiple bus rides and worrying about catching the last bus back before we got stuck in Argentina for the night! Our small group included the two of us plus my sister, Carol, along with 4 gringos: 2 Canadians from Quebec (Mario and Francois), a Dutchman (Nils), and Olivier from France.
They were all nice, and the tour was a success. It makes sense that the Iguazu Falls are on the shortlist for the 7 Wonders of the Natural World: the place really has a magical feel to it. I have never seen as many butterflies OR bigger spiders before (we’ll spare you of the pictures). Over the course of the day we also saw hordes of playful koatis (a cute relative of racoons), tropical birds, lizards large and small, one lone scared monkey, a chubby little red deer, and a toucan. We started by taking the 2-mile train ride to the long bridge over toward the Devil’s Throat (the falls’ largest continuous curtain of water) at the end of which we got soaked and witnessed my sister getting stung by a bee for her first time. She had no idea if she was allergic or not, but given she did not stop breathing or break into hives within a few minutes, we figured she would be fine.
In the afternoon we walked around a few more trails before embarking on the actually exciting part of our tour: taking a boat ride upriver into the falls! As you may imagine, this kind of adventure involves getting completely soaked, and picture-taking was not an option (of course, throughout the boat ride one of the guides is filming the whole thing, just in case you want to drop 60 bucks on the DVD). Even more so than we expected, the experience was breathtaking, overwhelming, awestrucking… and very, very wet. It certainly created a vapid feeling of “oh sh#t, are we really going toward that waterfall?” and then seconds later you couldn’t see a thing. It’s totally worth it, and we would definitely recommend it to anyone who makes it all the way to Iguazu (except for babies, older folk, or anyone who’s afraid of water). The picture below is not the greatest, but should give you the idea of what you’d be getting yourself into:
See, that’s the “oh sh#t” part.
Our Argentina tour lasted close to 10 hours, so we were wasted by the time we got back to the hotel. That night we discovered an awesome “per kilo/all-you-can-eat” restaurant that we ended up returning to twice more before the end of the trip.
The next day we went over to check out the Brazilian side of the falls. While in Argentina one can get awfully close to the cataracts, Brazil offers a shorter trail with an incredible panoramic view.
As in the previous day, we got lucky with the weather and the rainbows (it did get uncomfortably hot in the afternoon, but we’re trying our best not to complain so as to not offend our Northern Michigan friends). In the afternoon we headed over to the Parque das Aves (Bird Park), which predictably is a variation of a zoo focused mostly on birds. While every zoo has a lameness aspect to it, this one did have a neat feature: giant caged areas that you could walk into to hang around with your new bird-o-buddies. The level of coexistence was quite impressive, probably because these birds were either bred in captivity or “rescued” (whether that’s true of an euphemism, who knows) at a very early age. A toucan developed great interest and almost an appetite for my toes, but luckily through all of these interactive cages no one was hurt or defecated upon.
On Sunday morning we toured Itaipu, a bi-national hydroelectric dam/powerplant co-owned by Brazil and Paraguay. It was kind of eery to visit such an atrocity towards nature the day after seeing such genuine beauty: Itaipu is the world’s largest operational hydroelectric plant (there is a dispute with one in China; wiki it if curious). The dam is about 5 miles long and the generators produce virtually all of Paraguay’s energy and more than 20% of Brazil’s share. As an engineering feat it is truly brilliant, but it did leave me with the same gut feeling as a similarly artificial, human-built, godforsaken stretch of Indiana landscape we once passed through on the way to a Radiohead concert (which ironically must be what Thom Yorke experiences every day he wakes up, based on the band’s lyrical content).
We had an easier time posting videos on Facebook than on this blog, so below are a couple of links:
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=364083751208
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=363619101208
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amicornorkale
As I read this I got really worried you weren’t going to talk about food at all in this post! Glad to be proven wrong. Love you both.